


find something worth saving

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Buffyverse au, College/University, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Vampires, the other m9 members don’t show up as much sorry guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22445161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: Caleb deserves this hell. He’s done monstrous things, and death is a mercy the likes of him don’t deserve. So he just keeps his head down, stays out of sight, and in the meantime just makes the best of things. So long as he’s here, he may as well live as best as he can, right?or: Caleb is a vampire with a soul, and his best friend’s a Slayer. Molly is an anomaly from a circus. they’re roommates.
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 47
Kudos: 213
Collections: Widomauk Winter Gift Exchange 2020





	find something worth saving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thespacecat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespacecat/gifts).



> title is from Peter Salett's "Heart of Mine".
> 
>  **content warnings:** pretty heavy suicidal ideation for the first two sections as Caleb deals with his guilt. typical vampire content warnings: blood, death, shit like that. before he gets his soul back Bren lures a guy into an alley to drink his blood.
> 
> thank you to thespacecats#5069 for your prompt! I hope you like what I wrote for it, and I'm sorry if it seems rushed. I may decide to write more in this 'verse someday!

The thing about souls is that when you’ve been living without one for a while, you do some terrible, terrible things. The soul is where the conscience resides, the soul is where your very essence is, and when you lose that you are reduced only to your id. When you lose your soul, you have no morals left, and no desire to gain any. After all, they would only get in the way of what you _want_ , and if you want a meal right now, well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t lure the lovely young man into an alleyway. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t drain him dry there, and leave his bloodless body in that alleyway.

No reason but this: that young man had a family. That young man had a mother, and mothers—

Well, ordinary mothers have been known to lift cars off their children. Mothers with spells and curses at their fingertips can do far, far worse to the vampire that killed their child and drank his blood.

When he wakes, he does not remember anything for a blessed two minutes.

Then he does. Bren remembers two centuries’ worth of killing, of blood. He remembers Astrid, Eodwulf, and even Lucien, that damn tiefling, who keeps coming back around to him like clockwork every year. He remembers—

Oh, gods. He _killed his parents_.

A sob hitches in his throat, and his dead lungs almost seize before he remembers they’re dead. He’s dead. He _should be_ dead. It would only be right for such a creature as him to be dead, what happened, what—

“You’re awake,” cuts in a woman’s voice. Bren looks up to see her: dark hair, brown eyes, fair skin, pure disgust on her face as though Bren isn’t even worth stomping on. “Good. I wasn’t sure if you’d wake.”

“What,” Bren croaks, and winces. His throat hurts. He is trapped in an arcane circle in a basement in gods only know where, and there is a woman he has never met staring at him. “What did you _do_ to me?” he asks.

“I thought about killing you,” she says, bluntly. “I am no Slayer, but I have my tricks. I know how to kill a vampire.” She inclines her head as she steps around the circle. “But your death isn’t good enough,” she says. “Nothing will _ever_ be good enough, not for me, not for my poor boy. Do you remember him, vampire?”

“I’ve killed many boys over the years,” says Bren, but the answer comes out dull, horrified, rather than the defiant response he wanted. He’s killed so many people. “I think—you will need to be more specific.”

“That,” says the woman, still circling him, but her eyes flash with anger. “That answer. That is why death is not good enough for you. That is why death will not bring me the justice that I deserve, and _nothing_ can bring my son back to me. No force on Earth I can harness will do that for me.” Then she leans down, and smiles—sharp as a dagger, cruel as mercy. “So I gave you mercy,” she says. “I found your _soul_.”

Bren’s words stick in his throat. “You cursed me,” he whispers.

“A curse implies there’s a way to lift it,” she says, and lifts up her hand to show the open gash in her palm. “I made sure it would never lift. I’m an amateur at this revenge business, certainly, but I wouldn’t make it so easy for you to remove your soul.”

“Take it out,” he says, practically clawing at the circle, desperate and wild, “take it _back_ , or kill me, please, _please_ , anything but this, anything—”

“ _You killed my son_ ,” she says, and her voice is the crack of a whip. He flinches away from her, from her hard eyes, from her snarling mouth. “I promise you _hell_ , Bren Aldric Ermendrud. But it will be a hell of your _own_ making.”

\--

Caleb thinks about her, sometimes, three years on. Thinks about her son, who hadn’t expected his new friend to knock him unconscious and suck the life out of him. Thinks about how he’d drained his own parents dry, the first of his many victims, and how he’d burned the house down later so no one would know. Thinks about the tide of blood over centuries, and how he’d never realized he was drowning until that damn witch dragged his soul back into his body.

He had tried to die, once she’d turned him out with filthy clothes. He’d huddled into a corner on the street and tried to wait until the sunrise, but a policeman had chased him away. He’d wandered into a graveyard and thought about leaning against one of those stone crosses, letting it burn him away till he was nothing but ash on the wind. Once he’d even imagined returning to the witch and trying to kill her, knowing damn well that she would kill him first—he was weak, and broken from the weight of the guilt.

Eventually—

Well, she wasn’t wrong then, and she’s still not wrong now. Caleb _deserves_ this hell. He’s done monstrous things, and death is a mercy the likes of him don’t deserve. So he just keeps his head down, stays out of sight, and in the meantime just makes the best of things. So long as he’s here, he may as well live as best as he can, right? The witch had said his un-life would be a hell of his own making from the moment she shoved his soul back inside him, and it is, but even hell can have its moments.

So—the college degree.

UCLA is very easy to get into, when you’re a vampire with a photographic memory and a keen intelligence. Even moreso when your little goblin friend already studies there, and is willing to help insert you and your fake identity into a mass of students wishing to take the entrance exam.

So Bren Ermendrud, the Scourge of Europe and the monster in the darkness, dies, and Caleb Widogast walks out of the entrance exam with an uncertain future. When he gets the letter notifying him of his acceptance into the Literature course, he lets out an easier breath.

He doesn’t count on meeting the Slayer herself. He doesn’t count on becoming friends with the Slayer—with Beauregard, who’s headstrong and stubborn, who looked at Caleb the first night after they’d worked together to take down a demon infesting a bar beloved of the UCLA student body and its vampiric minions and decided he was worth _something_ , worth sparing, worth befriending. He doesn’t count on becoming friends with Beau’s friends. He doesn’t—

He doesn’t count on being _happy_. Not the sort of satisfaction that came after hunting down prey, but the kind of warm happiness that blooms in his chest when he looks up from his book to see Beau and Jester and Nott and Fjord and Caduceus, all scattered around his spacious apartment, chattering over classes and professors and readings and homework.

He never thought he’d have this, not while huddled in a dark alleyway, a filthy broken thing only brought out of the shadow in time by a concerned little goblin woman.

And so, like a complete idiot, Caleb lets his guard down.

Three years after the witch pushes him, recently ensouled and reeling from the guilt, out into the cold, Beau brings someone new into the fold.

Someone familiar.

\--

There’s a circus on the outskirts of LA that’ll take you away, is the rumor on the wind. There’s a circus that will give you your deepest, truest desires, and will grant your most secret wishes, for the low, low price of your soul. A soul, anyway. There’s a circus on the outskirts of town, and Caleb does not go, because it would require traveling by daylight and he has a group project to meticulously edit.

So he stays in his apartment in the day and goes to the library at night to do his work. Beau stops tagging along, but she keeps him updated on the suspicious activity at the circus, so he knows that she and Jester have found some kind of demon on the premises and are just working out how to approach it. “I don’t wanna have to slay it, if it’s just like, doing its job,” she says, once, the one time she does make it to the library to help him. “But if it’s bad…”

“Why don’t you tell me what it is?” Caleb asks. “I have—experience, with demons.” Both working for them and working against them, although the scales tip more towards working _for_.

“Grants wishes, looks kind of like a giant frog thing,” says Beau, “but the wishes get all fucked up and shit. We’re trying to see if that’s on purpose or not.” She tips her visor up to meet his gaze. “So what is it?”

“Hrak’kar,” says Caleb, a cold weight dropping into his

“ _What._ ”

“Not very good at granting wishes,” says Caleb, recalling what he remembers. “Usually on purpose. There is—the lore is complicated, but the gist of it is that they wish to feed off the despair of others.”

“So,” says Beau, “bad news?”

“Very bad,” says Caleb. “Do you need me to come with?”

“Nope,” says Beau. “You hold down the fort and edit the project. I’ll go kill the demon.” She pauses, then reaches over to squeeze his hand. “Sorry,” she says gruffly, “that I haven’t been real helpful. Like, as a groupmate.”

“You are fine, Beauregard,” Caleb assures her, squeezing back. For all her abrasiveness and spiky demeanor, Beau is truly a good person, who cannot turn away from an injustice done. A fine Slayer, too. She doesn’t deserve bad grades. “I will tell Mr. Willingham you did more than your fair share on this project. Do not worry over that, worry about surviving the fight.”

The next thing he knows, she does. The circus on the edge of town goes up in flames, but the ringmaster takes responsibility for the whole mess, claiming not to know that one of his performers had been planning arson all along. Caleb turns in the project and their group receives glowing marks, and he feels good about that the whole time he walks back to his apartment, the moon shining on him.

When he opens the door, Beau and Jester are already there, the two of them talking animatedly with a tall, dark-haired woman who smells of ozone and something burnt underneath, and—

“— _Lucien?_ ” Caleb says, stunned as hell, before he yanks out the stake in his coat. “Jester, get _away_ from him!”

“What?” says the tiefling—Lucien, fucking goddamn _Lucien_. “ _Who?_ ”

The big woman puts herself in between them, her mismatched eyes glowing slightly. Lightning crackles along her hair, along her fingers.

“Fuck’s sake, _Caleb!_ ” Beau snaps, and in a flash, she’s at his side, pulling him back. “Who the fuck are you talking about? That’s the fortune-teller from the circus, plus his bouncer friend—”

“That is _Lucien_ , he is _dangerous_ ,” Caleb says, “you cannot trust him—”

“My name’s Mollymauk, actually,” says the tiefling, peeking out from behind the woman. “Slayer, this is _not_ the warm bath and welcome I was promised.”

“I didn’t promise you _shit_ , asshole,” Beau snaps.

“I did!” says Jester, as cheery as always, and Caleb wants to scream. She doesn’t understand the danger she’s in, can’t she see it’s _dangerous_? “Molly, you didn’t say you knew Caleb, though.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” says Lucien—Mollymauk now, apparently. “I _don’t_.” His eyes flick to Caleb, and he says, “I think you have me mistaken, my dear fellow. I just have one of those faces.”

“We get this a lot,” the big woman adds. “In every town. Um.”

“I would recognize _your_ face anywhere,” Caleb spits, but Beau’s grip tightens on his arm, her fingernails digging into his skin. Reluctantly, he forces himself to relax, letting his stake hand drop, but he pointedly does not let go of the stake. Lucien. Of all people to show up here, it had to be fucking _Lucien_.

“Yeah, well,” Mollymauk says, “maybe I have a twin brother.”

“Lucien was over four centuries old,” says Caleb.

The big, pale woman turns to squint at Mollymauk. “You don’t look like you’re four centuries old,” she says.

“Fuck _me_ ,” says Mollymauk, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m gonna have to update all my fake papers, aren’t I.”

“Caleb,” says Beau, tense, “how about we take a walk?”

\--

“What the _fuck_ , man?” Beau says, as soon as the two of them have emerged into the night air. She rubs her hands together, cups them in front of her face, and blows, then crosses her arms as if trying to keep the heat in. “What was that all about? Molly’s an annoying asshole, but someone being annoying doesn’t warrant staking them. Besides, he’s not even a vampire, you’d have way more to clean up than just dust.”

“That was _Lucien_ ,” says Caleb. “That was—you do not understand, Beauregard—”

“So help me understand,” says Beau, grabbing his elbow and glaring up at him. “How the hell do you know some rando fortune teller from a circus? Why did you call him the wrong name?”

“I knew him _before_ I had my soul back,” Caleb says, pulling away. “And we were both—we were horrible people, but he was far more obsessed with furthering his own power and gathering followers than I ever was.” He laughs, and even to his ears, he hears the hysteria tinging his words. “He did terrible things to so many people for the purpose of some—some terrible being,” he says. “An Angel of Irons, he called it. He wanted its attention and its favor, more than anything, and he would do anything to get it.”

“The way you talked to him,” says Beau, “it sounded way more personal than that.” She cocks her head to the side. “You break up with him or something?”

“Breaking up with someone requires having feelings for them in the first place,” says Caleb. “Lucien and I blew off some steam together, _ja_ , I will admit that, but we were never—we were never foolish enough to imagine we were anything more to each other than a convenient body.” He huffs out a shaky breath, and runs his hand through his hair. “I saw him for the last time,” he says, softly, “two years ago.”

“He went after you?” Beau asks.

“Oh, he tried,” says Caleb, smiling mirthlessly. “He called me an embarrassment and tried to kill me. I called the police on him and ran. I—I do not know what he did to those police officers, I just know they bought me time. Perhaps with their lives.” He hunches in on himself, the memory of the flashing sirens ringing in his ears as though they’re driving past him.

There had been a time when he wouldn’t blink twice at having put humans between himself and another vampire, but that had been before the witch had shoved his soul back into his body. The soul hadn’t stopped him from calling, but it had played and replayed the screaming afterwards. _It was necessary,_ he’d tried to argue with it, but his conscience had only brought up all the _necessary_ things he had done over the years, without a soul.

Beau doesn’t say anything, just breathes out slow. “You didn’t see him,” she says, softly. “There was this kid at the circus, some little dwarven girl named Toya. When the demon you were talking about, the Hrak’kar, went bugfucking nuts, he kidnapped the girl and ran. And Molly just—flipped his shit. Told me that if anything happened to the kid he’d kick my teeth in, Slayer or not. He was _scared_ for that kid, Caleb.” She crosses her arms, and says, “And I kinda promised him I’d find him and his buddy Yasha a place to stay.”

“Did it have to be my place?” Caleb asks, almost plaintively.

“Oh, no, Jester volunteered to take Yasha into her apartment already,” says Beau. “But Jessie’s apartment’s not big enough for three, and you’re the only one with the extra room.”

“I cannot take him in,” Caleb says.

“Maybe not Lucien,” says Beau, “but I got a feeling about Molly, y’know? I think—maybe he’s the same as you.”

“You think he has a soul,” Caleb says.

“He’s not puking his guts out with guilt like you are, yeah,” says Beau, “but maybe he’s dissociating, or some shit like that. That happens, I hear.”

“I do not _puke my guts out_ ,” says Caleb.

“You threw up on my shoes when we first met and you realized I was the Slayer,” Beau says.

“Out of _stress_ ,” Caleb says. “No, this is—this is different from my situation, Beauregard. I don’t know how just yet, but I know it is, and I do not appreciate having to, to open my apartment to a man who has hurt and killed and destroyed so much, in the name of some dark and twisted god. No matter if he has a soul now.”

“You’re not the same vamp you were before you had a soul, yeah?” Beau asks.

“That’s—”

“Should I have staked your ass when you saved my life, because you used to be the scourge of Europe or some shit?”

“I don’t see—”

“Caleb,” Beau says, cutting him off. “Molly is an annoying little dipshit, and I’m pretty sure I’d strangle him if I spent more than a day around him. But he’s not the same evil fuck as this Lucien guy, no more than you’re the same shithead you were before you got your soul back. That much I saw just from staking out the circus.” She pats his shoulder, and says, gruffly, “Think about it this way. You get to keep an eye on him.”

“I suppose you’re not wrong,” Caleb begrudgingly allows. “You nearly _did_ stake me, though.”

“Fuck you, you puked on my shoes,” says Beau, punching him lightly on the arm.

\--

Perhaps the first giveaway that Molly is not a vampire anymore is the fact that at half past one in the morning, he passes out on the couch. Sprawls out, in fact, and drools into a pillow.

The second is when he looks into Caleb’s fridge and shouts, “Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake, do you have anything that’s _not_ blood in here? I can’t drink blood!”

“You did fine before,” Caleb snidely responds. He might’ve agreed to Beau’s request to let Molly stay in his apartment for a time, but fuck if he’s going to be happy about it.

Molly stares at him, and says, curtly, “You knew someone else before, then. I’m not a vampire. I didn’t do—whatever it is you think I did.” And he holds up a blood bag like it’s personally kicked his dog or something. “Tell me you have actual real food in this apartment somewhere,” he says, “or at least enough money for groceries. You’ve lived a long time, you’ve got to have some money put away, right? Invested in shit?”

“Uh, _ja_ , but most of it is for my tuition and paying off my friends’ student loans,” says Caleb. “There is petty cash in the kitchen drawer if you _must_ buy groceries, but Uber Eats and takeout menus exist.”

Molly blinks at him, and says, “You pay off people’s student loans?”

“Student debt is a real problem,” says Caleb, pulling the blood bag out of Molly’s hands. “And I do not wish for any of the people I care about to—to have to _worry_ about paying it off until they die.” Especially not Beau, whose parents stopped paying her way after she went to UCLA instead of Harvard or Yale. “They deserve better,” he says.

“I didn’t know vampires cared about student debt,” says Molly, baffled. He walks over to the kitchen drawers and starts pulling them out, finding the petty cash nearly immediately, and Caleb cannot help but compare him to the Lucien in his memory. Gone is the predatory stalk, the grace of a lion prowling for prey, the danger carved into every muscle and every scar. Here, instead, is a dancer’s grace, feet light in their steps, tail swaying lazily. “Especially not other people’s. Usually they just care more about drinking people’s blood.”

“You were a vampire,” says Caleb. “I—do not know how it is that you aren’t _now_ , but you were before.” Then he pauses, and adds, “It is—a very long story.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” says Molly. “And about that long story of yours, I think we have all the time in the world, don’t we?”

“No, we don’t,” says Caleb, “because I have an essay to turn in to my professor in three hours.”

“You,” says Molly, “are a strange vampire, Mr. Caleb.”

\--

Molly and his friend Yasha endear themselves to the rest of the group soon enough. It’s not hard to, because Caleb’s apartment is the most spacious one they have access to, and they pass in and out all the damn time. Molly doesn’t stay cooped up all day in Caleb’s apartment, either—he goes out during the day, and Caleb is not quite willing to admit that he’d maybe panicked the first time Molly strode out into the sunlight, half-afraid that he would burn up into ashes the second he stepped outside.

But he didn’t.

Whatever Lucien did to himself, it’s backfired quite a bit. Molly, Caleb quickly finds, is nothing like Lucien—he soaks up the sunlight with a zest that Lucien had never really summoned for anything but his dark god. He laughs easier, brighter, and he’s _alive_ in a way Lucien never really was, putting aside the whole vampire thing.

Caleb doesn’t know how this is possible. But then again, he once thought having a soul again would be impossible, but here he is anyway, a vampire with a soul. He’s come to learn that it’s best to treat anything as possible, these days, because he can never really predict the trajectory his life may take. He never thought he’d be friends with a Slayer, after all. And he certainly never thought that Molly would even exist.

He supposes that explains why Lucien stopped coming around. He had assumed perhaps the sudden ensoulment of his old playmate had finally chased the tiefling off, but at least this means there’s one less vampire preying on people, and Molly is—

Well. Caleb is growing used to having Molly around. He can admit that much to himself.

“It sounds like you _like_ him,” says Jester, one night, while she and Nott are keeping him company in the library. Beau is out on patrol again, because the work of a Slayer is never truly done, but she has Fjord and Caduceus backing her up, so Caleb’s not too worried.

“ _Nein_ ,” says Caleb. “I tolerate him. He is not as bad as I feared he would be, but he has clearly never roomed with someone before. He leaves his dishes in the sink _unwashed_.”

“What a _dick_ ,” says Nott.

“You’re a vampire, why do you care?” Jester asks. “It’s not like you were using the dishes anyway.”

“It is just good manners!” Caleb says. “But that is—relatively minor, in truth. He’s a far more colorful sort than I remembered his previous self to be.”

“Well, yeah, he’s from a circus,” says Jester.

“I still don’t trust him,” says Nott. “Both from what you told us and also the fact that he’s _from a circus_.” She smacks her palms flat against the table as she stands. “He’s a vagabond circus drifter!” she exclaims. “He’ll steal from you and leave you in the night!”

“I was a vagabond drifter when you found me, Nott,” says Caleb. “In fact I was much, much worse than Mollymauk.”

Nott sits down, and says, again, “I don’t trust him. He oozes charm and I don’t trust people like that.”

“He’s _fun_ , though,” says Jester, annoyed. “And he’s so smart! He gave me a reading, remember? He told me that what I was looking for was nearer than I thought!”

“He is not so bad, no,” says Caleb, surprised to hear the words coming out of his mouth. “I do not trust him either, but unwashed dishes aside—which I will speak to him about Nott, don’t worry—he hasn’t been too bad a roommate.” He huffs out a breath. “Inexperienced in the area, certainly, but he could be far worse. He could be dragging bodies into the apartment, and then we would be in quite a lot of trouble.”

\--

Molly doesn’t drag any body inside.

Except for his own, bleeding and bruised, one night.

“You should see the other guy,” he says, when Caleb nearly drops his finished photography project. He looks—not _good_ , leaning on a frantic-looking Beau, his hand clutching at his side.

“We went up against a fuckin’ cult and he got his ass kicked, is what happened,” says Beau, half-dragging Molly over to the couch.

“Why did neither of you go to Caduceus?” Caleb asks, setting his portfolio down and racing to the bathroom to fish out the first-aid kit. He can _smell_ Molly’s blood from here, and it smells strange. Alive, certainly, but with something else attached. “Or Jester?”

“He’s studying and Jester’s visiting her mom,” says Molly. “Anyway, this isn’t _that_ bad, I’m only losing a little bit of blood, happens all the time—”

“It should not happen at _all_ ,” snaps Caleb, almost taken aback by the ferocity in his own voice as he rushes out of his bathroom. “Beau, are you unhurt?”

“I’m fine, just gimme some disinfectant and gauze for my knuckles,” says Beau, showing him the scrapes on the backs of her hands. “It’s Molly you gotta worry about.”

“Don’t worry about me,” says Molly. “I’m fine!”

“You are _bleeding into our couch_ ,” says Caleb, testy. He’s already fed before this, so he’s not too tempted by the smell of Molly’s blood, but damn it, he’d _liked_ this couch. It was nice and plush and now Molly’s lying on it and bleeding into it. Molly _should not_ bleed into the couch, should not bleed like this at all, Caleb cannot—

“Our?” says Molly.

“You live here,” says Caleb, trying to push down the slow, horrible realization that, shit, he _cares_ for this tiefling. “We’re roommates, that means this is—this is your home now, _ja_? Hold still, please.”

“What are you— _ow!_ ”

“It’s just disinfectant, he didn’t kick you in the balls,” huffs Beau, holding Molly down as he winces, instinctively trying to squirm away from Caleb’s grasp. “Fucking hell, Molly, let the man work.”

“Please,” says Caleb, taking his hand. “Please, stay still.”

Molly’s red eyes flick upward to meet his gaze. They aren’t solidly red, it’s just that his pupils are barely distinguishable, unless one is looking closely. And Caleb is looking closely now, his breath catching in his throat when the heavy red gaze locks with his. _Oh, no,_ he thinks. “Well,” says Molly, “since you asked so nicely.”

Caleb does not look at Beau, but instead ducks his head down and starts working, trying to stem the blood flow.

\--

 **BEAU:**  
hey jessie?

 **JESTER:**  
hiiiiiii  
what’s up beau

 **BEAU:**  
you know when you said that caleb and molly would be bumping uglies at some point and i told you caleb hated this lucien dude too much  
and you told me true love strikes when you least expect it and shit  
i stand corrected  
they were eyefucking IN FRONT OF ME

 **JESTER:**  
I KNEW IT


End file.
